anti-war protests, WWP, etc

Daniel Davies dsquared at al-islam.com
Mon Nov 4 03:37:42 PST 2002


Anyone care to guess the identity of the author of this piece ...??

dd

That bad old-time religion: It's official. The anti-war movement is a Communist front.

No, I'm not kidding -- go read the story. Investigative reporter David Corn digs into last Saturday's D.C. antiwar rally and finds it was covertly masterminded by a Communist Party splinter originally founded in support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. For good later, he further digs up the fact that one if the principal organizers of the inane "Mot In Our Name" petion is a revolutionary Maoist.

Words almost fail me. There are just too many levels of delicious, deadly irony here.

For starters, the U.S. revolutionary Communist movement has been reduced to organizing demonstrations in support of a fascist dictator with a history of brutally suppressing and murdering Communists in Iraq. OK, so there's precedent for this; the CPUSA organized anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. during the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939-41. It's still bleakly funny.

More generally the American Left seems bent on fulfilling every red-meat right-winger's most perfervid fantasies about it. All those earnest anti-war demonstrators were actual communist dupes! Oh, mama. Somewhere. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy is smiling. Who was it who said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce?

Farce because, of course, Communism as an ideology capable of motivating mass revolutions is stone-dead. (Well, everywhere outside of Pyongyang and the humanities departments of U.S. universities, anyway.) At this point one can contemplate vestigial organs of Stalinism like the Revolutionary Communist Party with a sort of revolted pity, like portions of a vampire corpse still twitching because they haven't yet gotten the message about that stake through the heart.

If I were a conservative, I'd go into a roaring, vein-popping rant at this point. And, secretly I'd be damn glad for them Commies. They simplify things so much. Because there will be more stories like this one. All the Communists can accomplish by organizing the anti-war movement is to thoroughly discredit it — a fact our reporter (quite typical of U.S. journalists in that he both leans left and is too ignorant to notice how much of his world-view is Communism with the serial numbers filed off) notes with poorly-veiled regret.

So, by supporting a militarist fascist in Iraq, them commies are very likely to wind up increasing the influence of precisely the `reactionary' element in U.S. politics that they most abominate. Congratulations, comrades! Welcome to the International Capitalist Conspiracy!

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